It's no secret that B2B marketing and sales teams have been hit hard since the pandemic struck, most notably their ability to connect with customers and prospects in person.
One of the most valuable marketing and sales tactics over the years has been in-person events: tradeshows, customer meetings, regional meet-and-greets, executive briefings, roadshows and nearly any other conceivable excuse to sit down face-to-face. Smaller events in particular were considerably important for engaging early-stage prospects, accelerating in-market deals and expanding wallet share with existing customers.
COVID quickly put a halt to almost all of these events, although things have picked up to some extent more recently. But that doesn't diminish the reality that frontline marketers need alternatives that are just as powerful and engaging as live, in-person events. That's what Folloze Live Events is all about: planning and executing high-touch virtual marketing events as easily as setting up your fantasy football lineup.
B2B Buyers Prefer Online Engagement
It all starts with fulfilling the modern buyer experience. Today's B2B buyers want to chart their own path down their journey to a purchase, and they rely on digital media and channels more than ever to make that happen. They want to learn about business problems, research potential solutions and hear success stories online, where they can consume content when and how they want. But they also don't want to be inundated with unnecessary touches and pitches, which can quickly leave a poor impression and turn otherwise interested buyers away.
Highly targeted, live virtual events are the perfect remedy. They allow frontline marketers to engage in a format that is amenable to every stage of the buyer journey, all on a reusable medium to create long-term customer value. Targeted virtual events take many shapes, including:
- Workshops: Great for a smaller group of prospects or buyers who want to get interactive, hands-on experience with a specific product or service
- Virtual Executive Briefing Centers: With executive engagement a top priority later in the sales cycle or as ongoing outreach, EBCs are a great way for frontline marketers to get facetime with key executives personas
- 1:1 Accounts Meetings: Create a bespoke virtual space for a personal event, like a large-group demo or workshop for a specific account
- Roundtables: Roundtables are a great way to offer a 2-for-1 to either executives or practitioners by providing a space for like-minded personas to network and leverage each other's best practices
- On-Demand Conferences & Webinars: And don't forget these tried-and-true demand capture events, complete with modern personalization tools at your disposal
How Folloze Live Events Works
Folloze Live Events was designed to make creating and executing virtual events easy and intuitive, with drag-and-drop tools that require no coding experience. The solution features:
- Native Video Integrations with support for Zoom Meeting & Webinar, plus all industry-standard video hosting platforms, like Brightcove, Wistia, Vidyard and more
- Native Simu-Live Streaming to live stream pre-recorded content with our very own built-in video player, no additional tools required
- Drag-And-Drop Design to quickly create and launch engaging event experiences to audiences of any size, on-brand and fully compliant with your organization's guidelines
- Dynamic Personalization for bespoke experiences specific to attendee role and interests at every stage of the event lifecycle
- Automated Registration with point-and-click landing page setup, simple calendaring and automated email follow-up
- Orchestration Tools so frontline marketers can collaborate with sales in real-time and orchestrate email engagement on behalf of connected sellers
- Engagement Analytics & Dashboards for granular measurement of attendee engagement, including time spent and content viewed, to give a better picture of event performance
- All Out-Of-The-Box providing a fully-integrated, all-in-one solution that's simple enough for any frontline marketer to use
Optimized to Integrate with the Overall Buyer Experience
Creating virtual events may sound like an easy task to the layperson, but seasoned frontline marketers know you can't just turn on a webcam and record a live event. The experience will fall well short of what today's B2B buyers want to engage with. Instead, Folloze Live Events empowers marketers to reimagine how they deliver and scale virtual events by taking a more targeted approach to audiences of different sizes. Marketers rarely have the time to collaborate extensively with central digital marketing teams, often having to file a ticket every time they want to create a new event or risk settling for a simple video conference call. Now, they can do it all themselves.
Not only are frontline marketers charged with orchestrating the buyer experience, they need to be thinking about new ways of pulling sales teams into the fold along the way. Folloze Live Events makes it easy for sales to become a key part of the event creation and execution process. No more sending notes to sales asking them to forward invitations to specific clients. Instead, orchestrate email engagement directly in the inboxes of your sellers and align them alongside your digital promotion strategy.
Live Events allows you to orchestrate engagement before, during and after events, including:
- Pre-Event Registration & Promotion to easily build compelling destinations for event registration and promote speakers, agendas, key talking points and more
- During-Event Delivery & Execution to offer a complete video experience embedded natively into any Folloze experience and share contextually relevant content with attendees alongside the video feed
- Post-Event Follow-Up to extend event ROI with targeted follow-up, calls to action, key takeaways and analytics, and to make it easier for attendees to forward their experience along to others
Conclusion: Targeted Virtual Events Supercharge the Buyer Journey
As we enter this new era of hybrid live and virtual engagement with B2B customers, Folloze is making it easier to make events a more embedded part of your overall demand programs. The platform and tools are all there, and they're as simple as ever to use. With competition for buyers so intense in the current environment, Folloze Live Events is another key ingredient for frontline marketers looking to master digital in our new experience era.
